Trail Talk: Mills Kelly

This guest blog comes to us from Mills Kelly, author of  Virginia's Lost Appalachian Trail. Historian and lifelong hiker Kelly will join us at the festival this year to  share a bit of his current project: A Hiker's History of the Appalachian Trail, a comprehensive chronicle of the A.T. told through the experiences of individual hikers.

When you go on a hike on the Appalachian Trail, what do you bring to eat? 
 
If you’re just out for a few hours or maybe for the day, you probably packed some energy bars, maybe some fresh or dried fruit and something snacky like trail mix or a candy bar. If you’re backpacking, you might have some freeze-dried meals, some oatmeal, some jerky and lots of energy bars, trail mix, or other high carb, high protein snacks.
 
But if you were hitting the trail in the 1930s, '40s or '50s, you almost certainly brought along some onion sandwiches—two buttered slices of bread and a nice, juicy slice of fresh onion. 
 
For my forthcoming book, A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail ), I researched what foods hikers brought with them in their packs over the decades, and some of what I found was quite a surprise. Ever since I started seeing onion sandwiches on hiker “grub lists” from the 1920s to the '60s, I wondered if anyone I know had ever eaten one, much less taken such a sandwich with them on the trail. I asked around and the closest I got was one friend who told me that her grandmother used to eat them for lunch on Saturdays. As far as hikers are concerned, onion sandwiches have gone the way of the dinosaur.
 
But what about bacon? If you’ve ever camped at an Appalachian Trail shelter, there's a reasonable chance that you woke up to the smell of bacon sizzling in a pan either at the shelter or in someone’s tent site. I think it’s fair to say that long distance hikers get their bacon fixes in restaurants near the trail, but until at least the 1960s, they were advised to bring large slabs of bacon with them on their treks.
 
How did they keep that bacon from greasing up their packs, especially in warm weather? Simple! Abercrombie & Fitch, which used to be America’s most important supplier of outdoor gear, sold something called a “pork bag” that hikers used to keep all that grease at bay.
 
And then there was “Dynamite Soup.” Over and over, I kept seeing references to this soup in the hiker advice literature. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find any trace of it in product catalogs or old advertisements. Like a small pebble in my hiking shoe, not knowing what Dynamite Soup was annoyed me. As things often go in the archives, I found the answer when I wasn’t looking for it. A couple of years ago, I was reading the correspondence of one of the founders of the Appalachian Trail and in a letter to a friend, he laid it all out for me:
 
"One of our mainstays is [a] soup or stew that is not always above suspicion. With a basis of a handful of rice we add any dehydro vegetables in sight, especially onions, and a stick of Erbswurst, also know from its appearance and its (later) explosive qualities, as dynamite soup—with a little slab of chopped bacon and anything else that is lying around camp." 
 
So there it was, “dynamite” because it was gas-inducing. I’m not sure how I didn’t think of that in the first place.
 
What hikers ate “back in the day” is just one of the many ways the hiker experience on the Appalachian Trail has changed over the past 100 years. Gear, the environment, the trail’s route—all are very different today. The A.T. is always changing, as are the hikers who put one foot in front of another heading north or south. Here’s hoping that onion sandwiches never come back.

--Mills Kelly
 
 
 

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